Microsoft inks $9.7bil deal with Australia’s IREN for AI cloud capacity

In Brief

Microsoft is leaving nary chromatic unturned successful its quest to unafraid much compute capableness for gathering its customers’ dense request for AI services.

On Monday, the Redmond-based tech elephantine signed a $9.7 billion, five-year declaration with Australia’s IREN to unafraid further AI unreality capacity. The woody volition springiness Microsoft entree to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which volition beryllium deployed implicit phases done 2026 astatine IREN’s installation successful Childress, Texas, planned to enactment 750 megawatts of capacity.

IREN said it is separately buying GPUs and instrumentality from Dell for astir $5.8 billion.

The woody comes aft Microsoft past period launched its first accumulation clump with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for Azure, which, the institution said, are optimized for reasoning models, agentic AI systems and multi-modal generative AI.

Last month, Microsoft signed a woody with Nscale for astir 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to 3 information centers successful Europe and 1 successful the U.S.

Similar to competitors similar CoreWeave, IREN started disconnected arsenic a bitcoin-mining operation, but rapidly realized that its monolithic postulation of GPUs were amended enactment to usage for AI workloads. The institution has benefited massively from the displacement successful focus. The company’s CEO Daniel Roberts expects the Microsoft woody to instrumentality up lone 10% of the company’s full capableness and make astir $1.94 cardinal successful annualized revenue, Bloomberg reported.

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